Programming on the Edge

I've been a user of Eclipse for many years now and when I saw there was a free t-shirt to be had by reviewing the newest release there was only one choice to make. :)

The download is exactly the same as all previous releases but the first thing that struck me was the startup time. Granted I have no plugins installed yet, but Eclipse was up in just a few seconds and that already has me excited. Performance has always been the biggest problem in Eclipse and if they've made major strides in that direction I'm a happy camper.

Granted this is RC4, but immediately after downloading and unzipping I checked for updates and it spend the next 5 minutes downloading a pretty large update to the Eclipse SDK and made me restart when it was done. Again, RC4, so lets just hope the actual releases are up-to-date. :)

Installing MercurialEclipse and the Scala plugin went smoothly and I went to pull down Sgine (http://sgine.googlecode.com) and all was fine except Scala can't seem to build the project correctly. My guess is this is a bug in the Scala plugin with Helios.

After spending a bit more time with it I haven't really seen much difference in 3.6 and 3.5 apart from some performance improvements. However, performance alone is a very worthwhile feature.